Schedule
Day 0: Sunday, December 17
For participants arriving by air, we recommend taking RDU Taxi from the Raleigh-Durham airport to the Hampton Inn. The fare will be about $45, and we can reimburse you if you save your receipt.
6:30pm Dinner with participants visiting from out of town at Milltown.
Day 1: Monday, December 18
Spatio-temporal reconciliation tools for data curators and catalogers
To reconcile is to provide a partial description of some entity of interest, in order to find an identifier that unambiguously identifies the entity. A typical “reconciliation service” takes a partial description in the form of a textual label for the entity (e.g. a place name), and returns a ranked list of identifiers for candidate entities. Entities of interest in the humanities and cultural heritage institutions are described in a wide variety of ways. Descriptions of entities’ relations to locations in space and time are especially interesting, as these can be provided both as a wide variety of proper names or natural language descriptions, and as a slimmer variety of both spatial footprints (points or polygons) and temporal extents.
Day 1 schedule
The Hampton Inn serves a complimentary breakfast. Other nearby options include Gray Squirrel Coffee Company, Cafe Carrboro, and Rise Biscuits & Donuts.
8:30am Shuttles leave the Hampton Inn for UNC campus. If the weather is suitable, a group will also be walking to campus (about a 20 minute walk on flat terrain).
9am Workshop begins at School of Information and Library Science, Manning Hall, Room 01.
9–10:30am Extended introductions: everyone will introduce themselves and provide some (brief!) background on their relevant projects and research.
10:30–11am Coffee break
11–12:30pm Reconciliation and reconciliation tools. Participants who have built reconciliation tools and who do reconciliation in their work will be asked to talk about their experiences. What are the different ways people are already doing spatiotemporal reconciliation?
12:30–1:30pm Lunch
1:30–4:30pm Questions and challenges for reconciliation: What are the different use cases for spatiotemporal reconciliation? Is there a use for wider agreement around standard APIs for spatiotemporal reconciliation?
4:30pm Wrap-up
5:00pm Shuttles return to the Hampton Inn.
6:30pm Dinner at Venable.
Day 2: Tuesday, December 19
Aggregating spatiotemporal points associated with cultural artifacts
When we have large collections of artifact descriptions that employ some combination of textual labels, subject identifiers, and spatiotemporal locations, it becomes possible to aggregate artifact descriptions that link to the same spatiotemporal concept (a place, a period, a person, an organization) and “lift” the cloud of spatiotemporal points associated with those artifacts to the spatiotemporal concept. This cloud becomes yet another way to describe the spatiotemporal extent of the concept.
Day 2 schedule
8:30am Shuttles leave the Hampton Inn for UNC campus.
9am Workshop begins at School of Information and Library Science, Manning Hall, Room 01.
9–10:30am Today’s topic is a bit more abstract than yesterday’s, so we’ll begin by trying to make sense of it: why is this interesting?
10:30–11am Coffee break
11–12:30pm What’s been done already? Existing examples of analyzing large collections of descriptions of spatiotemporally located artifacts.
12:30–1:30pm Lunch
1:30–4:30pm Questions and challenges for aggregating spatiotemporal points: What are the different use cases for this kind of analysis? Visualization? Reconciliation? Search? What approaches are promising? Is there potential for broader collaborations or grant proposals here?
4:30pm Wrap-up
5:00pm Shuttles return to the Hampton Inn.
6:30pm Dinner at Glasshalfull.
Map of locations
Wifi access
The UNC campus is served by eduroam. If you do not have eduroam access, you can use the UNC-Guest-PSK network—the password will be provided at the workshop.
List of participants
Italicized participants will join us remotely.
Adam Rabinowitz is co-PI of the PeriodO project and Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin.
Antoine Isaac is R&D Manager of Europeana, the European Union’s digital platform for cultural heritage.
Daniel Schwartz is the Director of Syriaca.org and Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University.
David Newbury is the Software and Data Architect at the J. Paul Getty Trust.
Joan Beaudoin is an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Wayne State University whose work focuses on the use of digital image libraries.
Karl Grossner is Technical Director of the World-Historical Gazetteer project.
Kun Huang is a Professor of Information Management at Beijing Normal University whose work focuses on digital library users’ information seeking behavior.
Mark Matienzo is the Collaboration & Interoperability Architect in Digital Library Systems and Services at the Stanford University Libraries.
Mia Ridge is Digital Curator at the British Library and an expert on public participation in historical research and the stewardship of cultural heritage.
Nate Trail is Digital Project Coordinator at the Library of Congress.
Patrick Golden is Lead Developer of the PeriodO project and a doctoral student in Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Rainer Simon is the Technical Director for Pelagios Commons and technical lead for the Peripleo spatiotemporal search and visualization tool.
Ryan Baumann is Digital Humanities Developer at the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing.
Ryan Shaw is co-PI of the PeriodO project and Associate Professor of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Stephanie Haas is a Professor of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill whose work focuses on the representation of information and natural language processing.
Worthy Martin is Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia.
Previous workshop
The 2016 PeriodO workshop was held at the University of Texas at Austin.